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Why do you think they don't have consensus or approval from all the people that matter? This is far too big for that. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cloudflare, etc, are all working together on this. Governments will like it for "security", and 99% of users won't care.



That looks an awful lot like a cartel.


No, this is how industries work. The slaughterhouse industry body does not ask the cows for their opinion.


> Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cloudflare, etc, are all working together on this.

Are they? Is there any evidence those companies support the proposal? I haven't seen any statements to that effect, but I might have missed something.


Perhaps this specific proposal is only Google's doing, but the concept in general, absolutely.

For example, these provide essentially the same attestation service for native apps consuming APIs, validating that the phone is not rooted, and the OS and app are unmodified:

https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/

Apple and Cloudflare combined to take it to the browser last year and basically no one noticed:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...

Of course that will be hooked up to Google's new thing as soon as possible!

Microsoft has also been preparing it with the whole TPM integration in Windows 11 and mandatory inclusion of such hardware in all prebuilt PCs since ~2015. That's what the Chromium integration builds on - Google can't actually do the foundation for this themselves on Windows.

You can absolutely bet that all of these companies are on board with whatever Google is doing.


I know about the Safari captcha system (the only one of those that's truly analogous to WEI). Nobody cared about it because Safari's market share is very small. I would care if those companies jumped on the Google proposal because Google has the market share to force this through and make it ubiquitous, which is why I was wondering whether those companies had come out in support of this specific proposal. If they had/will, that would make WEI totally inevitable.


I imagine we'll seem them "come out in support" by quietly deploying the feature in their browsers.


Apparently the proposal is working its way through the W3C, so they'll have to take official and public positions on it eventually.


Interesting, I'll have to follow that.




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